A passive optical network (PON) is a system for providing network access over “the last mile.” In a downstream direction, the PON may be a point-to-multi-point (P2MP) network comprising an optical line terminal (OLT) at a central office (CO), a plurality of optical network units (ONUs) at one or more customer premises, and an optical distribution network (ODN) connecting the OLT and the ONUs. PONs may also comprise remote nodes (RNs) located between the OLTs and the ONUs, for example, at the end of a road where multiple users reside. In recent years, time division multiplexing (TDM) PONs and wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) PONs have been deployed in order to increase bandwidth. In TDM PONs, each ONU may send and receive data across every available wavelength, but only at dedicated time intervals. In WDM PONs, each ONU may send and receive data in a continuous manner, but at dedicated wavelengths. A hybrid PON combining TDM with WDM can support higher capacity so that an increased number of users can be served by a single OLT with sufficient bandwidth per user.
The rapid growth of internet traffic continues to push broadband optical access networks to support higher data rates and better quality of services. For instance, the capacities of optical channels in some optical networks, such as PONs, are approaching about 40 gigabits per second (Gbs). Although the demand to increase bandwidth and throughput continue to grow, designs for improving optical networks are often constrained by cost, power, and size requirements. Moreover, today's PONs may not be efficiently utilizing network resources. For example, in a PON, OLT resources allocated for one ODN may not be shared with an ONU allocated for a different ODN.